In my co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/069,614, filed Feb. 28, 2005 and incorporated herein by reference, I disclosed a user interface with a thin display device that displayed data related to the input. The device includes a panel on which several input controls such as pivotable switches and rotatable knobs could be mounted, with feedback information provided to the user on a thin display. The user can manipulate the controls to, e.g., adjust volumes, pulse width modulations, etc. of an electronic device such as a waveform generator or music synthesizer, and feedback information is provided to the user on the thin display. A “thin display” is defined to not include liquid crystal displays (LCDs) but to include a class of thin, light displays that consume little power, such as thin-film transistor backplane displays, electrophoretic displays, electro-optical displays, organic electro-luminescent displays, and microcapsule displays. Exemplary non-limiting thin displays are those made by E.Ink and disclosed in, to give but one example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,639,578, incorporated herein by reference.
While useful, requiring a single panel to hold all the displays may require the panel to be custom-made, reducing the flexibility of the device and rendering it problematic to change the control layout for different types of electronic devices. The present invention addresses this issue.